


the knight of swords.

by firewlkr



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Bonding, F/M, Fluff, POV Dana Scully, Romance, Tarot, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-23 14:09:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18551359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firewlkr/pseuds/firewlkr
Summary: "“Fun?” Mulder raises his eyebrows at her with some skepticism. “Eating shitty take-out and doing homework on a Friday night with the FBI’s biggest embarrassment is your idea of fun? You might be more boring than me.”“Yes, Mulder. It is my idea of fun,” she smiles down at him." Mulder reads Scully's future with tarot cards. MSR.





	the knight of swords.

**Author's Note:**

> a/n: i'm only a beginner with tarot, so if you're more accomplished at it than i, please excuse some details for the sake of the fic. :)

_ they say you are dangerous, but I don't care _   
_I'm gonna pretend that I'm not scared_   
_if this only ends in tears_   
_then I won't say goodbye_   
_'cause I couldn't care less_   
_if they call us reckless_   
_until they are breathless_   
_they must be blind_

_ dangerous - the xx _

 

“Have you ever heard of cartomancy, Scully?” Baleful green eyes blink at her from across the room. They’re sitting on his apartment floor together, backs against the worn leather of his couch, every inch of the water-ringed coffee table covered in monosodium-glutamate-saturated Chinese food and case files, glossy photos of corpses and desiccating flesh betwixt cheerful half-empty cartons of rice and chow mein.

“Cartomancy? Fortune telling, Mulder?” She wrinkles her nose at him as if she’s smelled something particularly awful and lifts another chopstick-full of steamed vegetables to her mouth. She’s never been very good at eating with chopsticks despite a brief stint in South Korea with Ahab’s Navy and she only manages to catch a broccoli floret in her teeth before the rest of the vegetables drop back into the container. Mulder expertly scoops rice and meat into his mouth with a curious twist of his wrist. He licks his lips surreptitiously, pink tongue swiping full lips. 

“Mmm. Has anyone ever performed a reading for you, Scully?” 

She is vaguely uncomfortable in her sensible workplace attire, the cloying summer heat rendering the hair on her nape sticky and troublesome. He’d called her just as she’d been on the way home from the grocery store, one of those things that made her thoroughly despise the evolution of technology that allowed Mulder to violate her privacy every which way to Sunday. “Hey, Scully! Bad time? I’ve got some questions on last week’s case file, mind coming over and going over it with me? Got to have this on Skinman’s desk by eight a.m Monday morning or you’ll have my desk all to yourself.” And like the good little girl she was, eager to please every commandeering man that sauntered into her life, she went with no question. 

“A couple of times,” she tells him without knowing why, trying to divert her attention back to the beleaguered autopsy report in front of her nose. Tarot had come up in this most recent investigation; the murder suspect had been leaving dog-eared Rider-Waite cards with his victims, and while it hadn’t required much more knowledge than cursory, Mulder, in his uniquely mule-ish way, refused to let it go.Scully takes another bite of rice and continues speaking, “Missy was really into tarot, especially in high school. Sometimes I’d let her do a spread for me, but it was always more trouble than it was worth. For the next month, she’d insist that whatever damned card I’d gotten was going to come back to haunt me if I wasn’t careful.”

“Surprised you’d even let her do that much.”

“I was curious,” she admits sheepishly. “In high school, it seemed… rebellious and occult. Now I know it’s juvenile and preposterous. Every reader will tell you the cards mean something different, depending on how much money they can swindle you for.” 

“Do you believe in the possibility of divination, Scully?” Mulder asks, smiling at her, laugh lines wrinkling around his eyes. He already knows her answer, has it memorized, but of course, he wants to hear it from her lips himself. Sometimes she feels as if she’s just playing the script he’s already prepared for her with these questions. 

“Of course not. It’s just cheap parlor tricks and vague descriptions. It’s only for those weak-willed enough to believe a deck of cards or tea-leaves have any influence over their lives.”

“But there’s something insightful in that, isn’t there?” He persists, leaning forward in that deeply discomfiting way of his, taking great pains to invade her personal space with his after-shave. He’s wearing a sky blue button-down straight from the office that she sincerely cannot get enough of. Three buttons down and a vast landscape of tanned skin and wiry chest hair she could lose herself in. Sleeves impatiently shoved up to his elbows and rolled up only to keep them from falling down, baring corded forearms that flex perceptibly as he taps his long fingers on her kneecap. Tap, tap, tap. Commanding her attention. _Only me, Scully. Only me_ , they seem to say in Morse code. “Kind of like reading a Rorschach test. It says more about the individual by what _they_ see in the cards then what the reader can tell them. It enables one to access the sub-conscious by utilizing chance and symbology. Sometimes, it can even enable one to admit dark truths they wouldn’t express otherwise.”

“Yes, well, even if that were the case,” she gnaws on her bottom lip to distract herself from the thrumming on her nylon-clad knee, “I highly doubt Jerome Scott believed in any potential psychological effects of tarot. It seems quite evident he felt the cards were directing him to commit these murders as a side-effect of his untreated schizophrenia.” 

“I’m not talking about Scott, Scully, I’m talking about _you_.” 

She exhales, the air hot between her teeth. “It doesn’t matter to the case how I feel about tarot cards, Mulder.”

“It matters to me.” His eyes twinkle with guile and charm. It’s infuriating. She tries to look away but his hand spreads wide on her kneecap, calling her back to him as he pats her leg. “So how ‘bout it? Want a Celtic Cross on your love life? If you get a Tower card, don’t blame the reader.” 

“You… you want to go pay some patchouli-smelling hussy to read my future? _Now_? Mulder, I thought I was over to actually get some work done…” The non-fat Chunky Monkey must have degenerated into a lukewarm soup into the carpet of her leased Buick by now. She could have been home all this evening, Bob Ross recording on the television, a medical journal in her lap, dishing out lovely cool ice cream instead of sweltering in this overpriced apartment with Mulder and his cheap take-out and tarot cards.“…Mulder, this is not my idea of a Friday night.” 

“Did you have plans?” He asks innocently, eyebrow quirking. He stands and moves to his desk, back bowed as he shoves open wooden drawers with a worn squeak. Scully fishes out a pink shrimp from the bottom of her Chinese carton. It worms around her chopsticks as if it’s alive with all the luck she’s having in fishing it into her mouth. He knows the answer. She never has plans. Her entire life revolves around whatever the hell he’s scripted for her, after all, so she doesn’t deign him with an answer. “Clear off the coffee table, will you? I’ve got enough of the report to finish it over the weekend,” he calls over his shoulder to her. 

Secretary, mother, waitress. She obediently collects all the papers into their manilla folder and lines up Mulder’s empty beer bottles neat as soldiers along the foot of the coffee table. He doesn’t sit beside her and instead kneels across from her and lays a tattered deck facedown on the wooden table before her.

“I had an ex at Oxford who was a bit of a hippie. She was obsessed with tarot. She taught me enough to get by and I did readings for a little cash at parties. I’ve only done it in the past decade if I’m in a mental block or to try to get a girl to sleep with me,” Mulder says casually to her.

“You read tarot.” She looks at him incredulously. Why was she surprised? He picks up the cards with a smile and shuffles through them with practiced familiarity, tendons flexing in his hands and bared arms. She exhales, settles down cross-legged, and leans back against the couch. She has some curiosity in how Mulder would conduct this reading and elects to allow him to play this out for her. After all, she truly had nothing better to do. 

“Any numbers you’ve been seeing repetitively, Scully? A lucky number on a fortune cookie, that sort of thing?” He asks sagely. 

She thinks of the fortune cookie she just saw, receipts, percentages in calculations, his apartment number. “Forty-two,” she answers automatically. He nods. 

“Answer to life, huh? Four plus two is six, I’ll shuffle the deck six times. In the meantime, what is your goal with this reading?” 

“You tell me. I don’t even want my fortune read,” she sniffs. 

“That’s no fun, Scully. And it’s not fortune telling, it’s subliminal messaging, remember? You must have some sort of question that you can’t find an answer to, something nagging at the back of your mind. A lover boy, your finances, a promotion.”

She purses her lips in contemplation. “Do I have to tell you?”

“You should tell me the nature of the question so I can read accurately, but that’s all.”

She nods, deciding on a question. A nagging at the back of her head for the past several years, quiet and unanswered. “Alright. I have … a big decision I need to make. How about that? Is that enough?” 

“Mmm.” He nods, hands stilling on the deck. He lays them facedown and knocks on them thrice, then gestures to her. “Place your palm on the deck and meditate on your question. Dare I say, put some “good energy” into it.”

She rolls her eyes but obeys, staring down at her sweaty palm face down on the deck. She doesn’t know what “good energy” means but she wishes it’d cool down a little in this small, stifling apartment. When it feels appropriate she draws her hand back into her lap, watching him steadily as he picks up the deck.

“There’s any number of spreads that could aid you, but I think a three card spread will be the simplest for both of us to work with. The first will be…” he lays a card down, face-up before them. “Strengths.” A man charging into battle, white horse and sword in hand, is emblazoned on the card.

“What’s that?”

“Knight of Swords,” Mulder says with some authority. “Traditionally the family cards of the minor arcana suits are thought to represent an individual in your life, either past, present, or future. The Knight of Swords is a zealous, forceful individual, wholly devoted to success and considered seriously intellectual. They can be domineering and destructive at their worst.” 

She looks at up at him but he says nothing, moss-green eyes meeting hers with equality and openness.

“And the next card?” She says instead, uncomfortable.

“Mmm. Weaknesses.” He lays the next card beside the former and a thrill of terror rushes through her. Blood red and awful, the unmistakable Devil jeers up at her. “Uh huh.” He purses his lips.

“What does that mean?” She tries to control her voice. The parochial school-girl in her is quaking and telling Missy to stop and go to bed before Mom sees. She’s faced worse things than a dated depiction of the devil on some old playing cards since middle school but old habits die hard and the fear is as real as anything as she stares down at the card.

“The Devil represents all our addictions, our weaknesses. In this, I would assume it means that you have some sort of unhealthy attachment to someone or something. The devil is heavily associated with earthly appetites,especially including those sexual.” 

“So it’s not… evil, necessarily,” she says haltingly.

“No, not at all. But worth considering. In many schools of thought, the devil is thought to represent all that is human and selfish. The thirst for knowledge, for sexual fulfillment, for monetary gain. Something of that nature is holding you back from living to your fullest potential.” 

“Okay. Hmm. And what’s the next one?” Scully persists.

“Advice.” She doesn’t recognize this card; a figure stepping away from a series of golden goblets and a mountain in the background. “Eight of Cups,” Mulder says softly, long fingers lingering on the card. “Interesting.”

“Oh?”

“Quite simply put, you’re in a dangerous or bad situation and there’s nothing left for you here. The only thing you should do… is walk away from it, really.”

She leans back against the sofa and her throat feels dry and itchy. She’s silent for a long time, arms crossed below her chest as she considers the three cards before her. It’s all smoke and mirrors, Dana, why are you even pretending this has anything to do with your question? Mulder probably has a hundred different answers depending on what he thought she would be most receptive to. Could have stacked the deck in his favor, especially considering what he’d told her before. 

“Well… this has been _interesting_ ,” she says hoarsely, coming to her feet and brushing the wrinkles on her utilitarian navy-blue pencil skirt, “but I really have to be going now.”

“Scully.” 

“Uh huh?” She’s moving across the room to pick up her leather bag and heels.

“What was your question?” It’s a demand, only in the way Fox Mulder can demand things of her, with wide eyes and a curious twist of his lips. He hasn’t moved from his kneeling on the floor, gazing up at her. Despite bearing the supplicant’s pose he has all the power in their room and it unnerves her. 

“It… it doesn’t matter, Mulder, It was stupid,” she lies. “Thank you for the reading. Really. It was uh… enlightening. And affirming, I guess, in a way.”

“Affirming of what?”

“That tarot is nothing but bullshit,” she says frankly, collecting her leather purse from the chair she’d neatly placed it on earlier. “Goodni—“

“Oh, no, no, no. You can’t just run away because things are getting uncomfortable for you, Scully. Not this time.” 

She whips her head to face him, stunned by his forwardness. “You think I’m uncomfortable?”

“I know you are. I just want to talk it out.”

“You’re my partner, not my psychologist, Mulder.” 

“You’re right. I’m also your friend. So let’s talk, huh? What’s so bad about that?” 

“Quite frankly, It’s none of your business.”

“Somehow, I doubt that.”

It _is_ his business, in a way, as all things in her life have become. She knows damned well he’s her Knight of Swords and her Devil; her greatest strength and most debasing addiction but she was sick to death of him controlling her life in this way. Calling her on a Friday night for shitty food and cheap tricks, exclusively for his own entertainment. As if she didn’t have better things to do than have her time wasted. And it didn’t _matter_ that she didn’t have plans; why couldn’t he treat her time with an ounce of respect?

“You think everything is your business,” she snaps. “how heart-breaking it must be for you when my world doesn’t completely revolve around you and _your_ needs, Mulder.”

“If it doesn’t concern me, then why won’t you tell me?” he demands of her once more, coming to his feet. She can’t move fast enough to get the door open, fumbling on the door handle with sweaty fingers. She briefly entertains a half-cocked fantasy of him wrenching her wrist off of the door and smashing his lips against hers, sucking the air clean out of her and pressing her into the wooden door, but he only watches her struggle with the latch, arms crossed and waiting. 

She decides when she manages to wrench the door open finally. She wants to see him hurt, so she tells him, for no other reason but then to savor his pain for herself. 

“I asked whether I should leave the X-Files or not,” she says simply to him. 

She wants the pain and realization that sweeps across his face to feel sweet and rewarding to her as she stands, halfway through the doorway, but it’s not. It’s sickening and heart-rending to bear. Mulder wears his emotions on his sleeve with all his neediness and too-warm hands pawing at her at all times of the day. She has always had some inkling of how she meant to him, but it’s something else to see it now. His brows furrow with confusion and then ease with realization and his eyes dart down to the ground, ashamed and fearful. “Oh,” he exhales, the fight slipping straight out of him. 

_Oh, indeed,_ she thinks to herself sardonically.

She realizes she’s forgotten her heels in her haste to escape, standing short and barefoot at the door, and closes the door behind her, her decision made for her, to stay a few moments longer.

“I thought… that was it,” he says slowly, evenly, not quite meeting her eyes. “When I saw that last card, eight of cups, I was afraid. Because it’s true. You should walk away from this, Scully. We both know only ruin will come to you if you stay with the X-Files.”

“Mulder…” Somehow his defeatism is more infuriating to her than his stubborn reliance on her.

“This job has taken everything from you. Being a doctor, your sister’s life, your reputation—“

“Don’t… don’t, Mulder. You’re not… thinking rationally, how many beers have you had? You’re going to say something you don’t mean.” 

“Alright. You talk, then. What did those cards mean to you?”

She blinks hard, mind swimming, furious and fruitless.

“I need a drink,” she mutters, dropping her purse and moving into the kitchen to extract a cold beer for herself from the fridge. She lingers with the fridge door open, allowing the cool air to blow over the sweat lingering on her forehead and upper lip. When she comes back to the living room Mulder has his button-down stripped off and draped over the chair back, his white shirt beneath damp with sweat. The white is a pleasant contrast against his tanned skin and it takes a degree of self-control to mind herself as she watches him.

“This thing is the worst in summer,” he groans, a sticky wet noise as he rips his bare arm from the couch. Scully sits on the edge of the coffee table delicately, crossing her ankles as she takes a pull from the cold lager. 

“I think… we can both agree, you’re m— the knight,” she says quietly. _My knight_. My knight of swords. Destined to be on a whirlwind reckless adventure for the rest of his days, tearing life and limb apart to find his One Truest Truth. What would he do once he found that penultimate truth? Who knows. The knight certainly didn’t. Zealous and obsessive at his worst, controlling every aspect of her life with a cruel hand. 

“Seemed a bit heavy-handed, huh?” he agrees. “Is that how you see me? Zealous, holier-than-thou, obsessive?”

“At your worst,” she acknowledges plainly. “but you’re somewhat… different at your best.”

“Uh huh. And what did the devil mean to you?”

“My…supposed addiction?”

“Mm.”

“Well, I… I’ve come to rely on you, Mulder, you know?” She says sheepishly, staring at the perspiring beer bottle between her fingers. “Perhaps too much at times.” 

“And the job, too,” he says, gazing at her. 

“Yeah.” She nods. “It’s… all-consuming, sometimes.” 

“And there’s… an escape in it. You can ignore your own problems by focusing in on the cases and the truths uncovered. I say that only because I think we’re both more than a little guilty of that sort of escapism.” 

“As are most professionals in this sort of field,” Scully agrees. “Yeah, you’re right.”

“So the advice, then. Will you take it?”

She laughs, scoffing at him with a smile. “While you may take your advice from a deck of playing cards, I know well enough that those cards only hold what we see in them. I won’t be taking my advice from anything but sound logic.” 

“There’s the Scully I know and love,” he smiles cheekily at her. “I’m… I’m sorry for taking your evening away from you, Scully.” 

“No, don’t be, it was… uh, fun,” she shrugs nonchalantly, previous irritation forgotten and forgiven. 

“Fun?” Mulder raises his eyebrows at her with some skepticism. “Eating shitty take-out and doing homework on a Friday night with the FBI’s biggest embarrassment is your idea of fun? You might be more boring than me.”

She pauses, then places her bottle carefully on the coffee table and moves around stand before him and presses her lips gently to his forehead, tasting salt on her tongue as she leans away. 

“Yes, Mulder. It is my idea of fun,” she smiles down at him and makes her exit, slipping into her worn work-heels and closing the door behind her and striding to the elevator.

Missy would say she should consider the omen the cards had foretold and she’d live to sorely regret it if she chose to ignore such things. She would throw that eight of cups in her face to her dying day. Scully wishes she’d been here to see it, thinks of adaydreamy scenario of them, Missy, Mulder, and her, all young and college-aged, cooped up in someone’smessy dorm room and Mulder’s smirk as he passes her cards, each more salacious than the other as Missy watches, wide-eyed and serious. Scully might even pretend to believe then, if only it meant she could steal a kiss from those pouty, whiskey-stained lips. 

The cards could very well be telling her to walk away from her devil and knight of swords. _Abandon hope all ye who enter here_ may as well have been inscribed above their office door for all the good it had done her, she couldn’t deny the physical, mental, and emotional toil put upon her by her duty to Mulder and the X-Files. Walking away would be easy, simple.

But she wouldn’t. Not now, not ever. 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! had this one stewing for a while, got busy, but finally finished her up. 
> 
> go bother me on my tumblr! http://firewlkr.tumblr.com/


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